Vinales: I don’t care about the result, I want to enjoy race

Pole sitter Maverick Vinales heads into the San Marino MotoGP looking to lift the pressure clean off his shoulders by simply enjoying himself following ‘three bad races’ that could have ended in more serious harm.

The Spaniard remains well in the hunt for the 2020 MotoGP World Championship - 22 points off Fabio Quartararo - despite finishing down the order in Brno and Austria, before a spectacular crash in Styria further negated the strong position he’d established with two podiums at Jerez at the top of the year.

However, despite difficult results in recent races, on the other hand Vinales comes to Misano counting himself lucky after just avoiding a major incident in Austria when he was close to being taken out by crashing bikes in the first Red Bull Ring race, before a brake failure in the second forced him to jump off his M1 at 220km/h.

Reclaiming some confidence back with a lap record-breaking pole position at Misano in a repeat of his 2019 feat, Vinales’ main priority is to focus on the race from start-to-finish, rather than making bold predictions beforehand.

“I set a really good lap time in FP1 to secure the pass for Q2 on Friday morning, so I concentrated on race set-up. Even in FP3 making many mistakes in the lap I was able to do a 1m 31s. In FP4 we were consistent and all Yamahas are here and fast, so tomorrow we just need to improve what we did today and enjoy the laps.

“The only thing I want is to enjoy after three bad races, so I will push from the first corner to the last. I don’t care about the result, I just want to enjoy [myself] on the bike, enjoy it with the team and give the best performance I can do.”